Blog o cestovaní nielen po Japonsku / Travel blog

30. April 2014

25.-27. apríl – Sapporo

EN:The visit of Hokkaido island was one of the first planned destinations which I had set up before my arrival to Japan, considering the recommendations from Japan Guide and other forums I concluded that the best place to visit the island was Sapporo, the fourth largest Japanese city. Sapporo is relatively young city, it didn’t exist until 1866 and today it has more than two million inhabitants. The interesting thing is that the city itself was designed by foreign architects and with its long and straight streets it follows the American style of city growth. Maybe that’s why it looked a bit sterile, its monotonous design with no surprises of getting into the small, narrow streets like in Tokyo or Osaka and the lack of greenery (once again, when compared with Tokyo) didn’t impress me. The journey from Tokyo to Sapporo took around 10 hours on train, I used the Hayabusa Shinkansen to get to Shin-Aomori and from over there I had to take the normal express train. There will be a new Shinkansen track up in the north, but it will take some time to finish it. I recorded a short video in Hayabusa, so you can see how the fastest Shinkansen feels like (the link is at the end of Slovak text above).

EN:The park Moerenuma was another disappointment. It is considered to be one of the must-see tourist spots in Sapporo, but it’s located on the outskirts of the town and the bus service towards the park is not very frequent. There is virtually nothing of interest around the park, it’s an industrial area. It was the time of early spring in Sapporo in the time of my visit, so maybe because of that the park missed a lot of colors and greenery. But anyway, I didn’t like the park at all, even if there is an artificial hill with partially nice views of Sapporo and some kind of a weird glass pyramid building. I would say that this place is not a tourist spot, but mostly a meeting point for sports-loving locals, who can enjoy various activities in the park, including tennis, baseball, etc. I decided to go back to the hotel, then I went to JR Tower, the tallest building on Hokkaido island, with much better view of Sapporo. I visited the TV Tower in the evening with optimistic expectations of nice night shots of the town, but there were too many lights in the observation terrace which reflected in the glass and therefore messed up the options to take proper pics. Since once again the usage of tripods was not allowed, well, you know the story. My visit of Sapporo is recorded in my diary in a way ‘right, I can say I visited Hokkaido and Sapporo’ and that’s about it. I believe there was a better destination to choose from in the north, but it was too late to think about it – I had to go on with using my JR Pass and there was no place and time for speculations. I didn’t even meet many foreign tourists, even though Sapporo is famous for the 1972 Winter Olympics.